Dehydrating Celery and Making Celery Salt
Simple Living. Creative LearningMaking your own celery salt is a great way to create a zero waste product, and can be easily done with celery leaves in just a few steps.
Ingredients
- Leaves from one bunch of celery
- Sea Salt
Instructions
Blanching Celery Stalks
- First, strip the leaves from the stalks of the celery removing as much of the stem as possible.
- Before dehydrating celery, you need to blanch it first. This helps to keep the lovely green colour of the celery.
- Bring a large pot of water to the boil.
- Wash the celery well, cut off the whitish bottom ends and the leafy tops, saving and freezing these for stock, if you wish or see below.
- Cut the celery stalks into small pieces, about ½ inch thick crescents, and place them in the boiling water.
- Leave them there for about 3 minutes, then remove and place in ice water.I f you are not dehydrating straight away, store in the fridge for up to 24 hours.
Dehydrating Celery and Celery Leaves
- Arrange the blanched celery pieces on the trays of a dehydrator, leaving space between the pieces.
- Dry at 135˚F or 60˚C until the celery is crispy and dry. This takes around 2 hours.
- If you are using an oven to dehydrate, place the celery pieces with space on lined baking trays. Set the oven to the lowest heat setting, prop the oven door open with a spoon. Remove from the oven when the celery is crispy and dry - around 2 hours later.
- To dehydrate the celery leaves, wash and dry as much as possible.
- Place the leaves in a single layer on a baking sheet if using the oven or on dehydrator trays.
- Bake in the oven at 180˚C / 350˚F for 5 to 7 minutes until dry and crispy.
- Or, dry in the dehydrator at 135˚F or 60˚C until the leaves are crispy and dry.
Celery Salt
- Once the leaves are dry, you need to grind them and mix them with salt. How much salt is your preference.
- Some like to you two parts celery leaves to 1 part salt, though I prefer to not use that much salt, so use 6 parts celery powder to one part salt.
- I also grind up the leaves without salt to use as celery powder.
- Store your celery salt and celery powder in air-tight containers.
Nutrition
Serving: 1teaspoon
Nutritional information is an estimate and provided as a courtesy. The values may vary according to the ingredients and tools that are used. Please use your preferred nutritional calculator for more detailed information.
Tried this recipe? Share a pic on Instagram